Consolidate and Simplify Your Security Environment

Overview: How can federal organizations stay ahead of today's sophisticated, fast-changing threats, particularly when budgets are tight? It's not that agencies lack protections. Most have put in place strong perimeter defenses and other security tools, but they cannot simply stand pat against threats that are constantly devising new ways to evade defenses, compromise networks, and exﬁltrate data. Agencies must be equally agile in countering evolving cyber threats. Doing so requires that they ﬁnd ways to conduct cyber operations more efﬁciently with their current set of security tools while also generating cost savings to acquire emerging technologies, such as behavioral analytics and outlier detection, which are becoming essential for defending against modern threats.

This goal can be achieved with a three-pronged approach that calls for consolidating and simplifying an organization's cybersecurity program:

Taken together, these steps will enable organizations to create efﬁciencies by integrating their security tools, processes, data, and management. This approach also will strengthen an organization's security architecture and guide implementation of a more agile and mature cybersecurity program to mitigate cyber risks and support government missions.